Ute Chief Ouray was just 47 years old when he died in 1880. This photo was taken by famed pioneer photographer William Henry Jackson at the Ute Agency in Saguache County in 1874.

His name is as famous today in western Colorado as ever before. Ute Chief Ouray is the namesake of a county, a city, a high school, a school district, a sporting goods store, a YMCA camp, a World War II liberty ship, Mount Ouray in Saguache County, Ouray Peak in Chaffee County and Ouray Electric Light and Power Company, incorporated just five years after the great chief’s death in 1880.

In Ute, ouray means “the arrow,” drawn from a meteor shower that streaked the sky over Taos, N.M., the night Ouray was born in 1833. But while his name came to represent wisdom, peace and the transformation of the American West, it also memorializes grief and devotion for a lost son.

His only heir, Queashegut, was 5 years old when he was stolen in a fight with Sioux warriors in 1863. Ouray had taken the boy’s first buffalo hunt with about 30 Ute warriors, when their camp was attacked near present-day Fort Lupton by 100 Sioux, Ouray would tell his second wife, Chipeta. Black Mare, the boy’s mother and Ouray’s beloved first wife, had died soon after the child’s birth, and he was raised by Chipeta, his nursemaid who married the chief when she was 16 years old in 1859.